


brand me a traitor

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Female Friendship, Gen, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Inhumans (Marvel), Introspection, Loneliness, Names, POV Female Character, POV Skye | Daisy Johnson, Pre-Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., St. Agnes Orphanage, Survivor Guilt, post-season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 09:55:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7356385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Surviving is what she's good at.</p>
            </blockquote>





	brand me a traitor

**SKYE**

That’s how they get you, through patterns.

A seemingly random combination of letters that betrays her typing patterns.

e - k - s - y

She learns about typing signatures at sixteen - not long after that she chooses her new name.

Or: s - k - y - e

Rearranging. Making sense of what doesn’t seem to have any sense.

The letters she uses the most in passwords and in coding. The letters that would get her in trouble, that would find her out. Other, older, greedier hackers. She faces them down and loses. She is just trying out her newfound powers. Public entities were easy to hack, but it soon became clear St Agnes received money from private funds and that sent Sue into a virtual goose chase. So far, only a couple of documents related to her search have surfaced, and nothing really relevant.

She has to get better. She has to be the best.

She needs a better name, the name of a hacker, not the name of a Catholic school girl.

Why not this one?

It sounds _pretty_. She is still young enough that this matters. She wants a pretty name.

Her greatest vulnerability becomes her id. That’s what she does.

The hack got her caught, but she also got her noticed. What better than to use the letters that brought her to notoriety among hackers.

After all, this is how she first starts thinking about patterns, the little clues people leave. She had been studying all her life, without noticing. It was survival. Her own patterns - after every new foster home, recalibrated. What did she do this time that made her prospective parents turn her down? She compared to the previous three, four, whatever times she was brought back to the orphanage. What was the common thread? What had she done? It would remain a mystery, and Daisy (but not Daisy yet) would almost lost her mind chasing those connections. If she knew what she was doing wrong, she could _fix it_ , correct it, get it right next time.

By the time she gets the name Skye she has long abandoned that illusion. She’ll never know why all those parents didn’t want her. But maybe she could know why her real parents hadn’t want her. Perhaps the original piece of the puzzle would illuminate the rest.

She had learn to hack because she wanted a name.

She knew the orphanage’s archives were confidential, and when she got the idea, at fourteen, she understood there was a good reason for that. She didn’t want to track down her parents or blame them for anything. She knew enough of life to know abandoning her didn’t make her parents bad people. Maybe her mother had gotten pregnant too young. Maybe it was a money thing. Maybe it was worse. Daisy wasn’t looking to point fingers.

She just wanted a name. 

(One that, hopefully, would be better than Mary Sue Poots, in any case)

Now she thinks this would be a good name, the name of her weakness.

“What did they do to it?” her friend Gina asks as they both stand in the living room looking at the inert screen of Sue’s first laptop.

She is living out of Gina’s couch right now. She left St Agnes a year before Sue did. She is older, she’s working, and a distant relative lets her stay here flat-sitting while he is abroad for work. Gina got to the orphanage when she was too old to get adopted by anyone, mostly, and she and Sue became friends over their similar situations. But Sue knows she’ll have to leave soon. She doesn’t want to get other people in trouble, especially not someone who has been kind to her.

To do what she needs to do she has to be alone, no restrains. She doesn’t care if she ends up in jail but if there’s someone with her she won’t be able to take the risks she has to take to find her family.

She gives up on the laptop.

“I didn’t know a virus could do all this damage,” she sighs. Buying another laptop is going to be complicated.

“You can’t even sell the parts?” Gina asks.

“Nope. These guys were thorough.”

“Oh let me get a hammer.”

“What?”

“Come on, this will feel good.”

She comes back from the kitchen and as promised she brings a hammer with her.

Sue gets the meaning and smiles. Of course Gina wants her to destroy the thing. She thinks that sort of stuff is beautiful.

She remembers Gina used to like breaking things in the orphanage too. She even got in trouble for smashing a baby Jesus porcelain figure once. The nuns made her cry insisting she would go to hell for killing baby Jesus. Gina and Sue had similar experiences with foster parents so she knew all about Gina’s anger, but she always envied the way in which she was able to proclaim to the world she was angry.

Even when she feels like breaking things all Sue has managed to do is 

Gina hands her the hammer.

“It’s not fair,” Sue says. “I’m a good hacker. I shouldn’t have been caught.”

She hits the laptop with the hammer once. Not too hard, but enough that a couple of keys on the keyboard come loose.

She hits it because it’s not fair that she lost this hack.

She hits it again. Harder this time, a clear hole in the keyboard, she hits it for the parents whose names she will probably never know.

She hits it again. And again.

For that house in the country with the dog that would never be hers.

For every time one of the nuns said God would personally punish her if she didn’t behave.

For that foster home when she was thirteen years, four months and twenty-one days old.  
The laptop splits in two and Sue keeps on smashing the screen.

For that high school test her teacher insisted she had cheated on.

For the two weeks after she run away without a plan she spent sleeping in a coach station.

Gina lets out a gleeful scream when the laptop screen breaks into a hundred tiny pieces.

The two girls look at each other and laugh.

It feels good, for a moment, breaking something. Then it feels way worse. She doesn’t notice that she has stopped laughing way before Gina.

“Sue?” her friend asks, worried.

“ _Skye_ ,” she replies.

Gina frowns. “What?”

“My name is Skye now.”

“Cool name.”

“Yeah.”

 

**DAISY**

She thinks she likes Bobbi’s reaction to the news best; she nods and smiles like it’s no big deal.

She thinks she resents this reaction the most (more than Fitz’s indifference, more than Coulson’s troubled frown - she wonders what May would make of it, she wonders what Simmons… it feels a bit like a betrayal, changing her name while they’re not here, while she doesn’t know) because it is a big deal, or it should be.

She is not sure of her decision.

She is not sure it’s her decision at all.

Not after everything that happened on the deck of that ship.

She wonders if she has the right to take the name Jiaying picked for her, seeing how her mother ended up hating her and trying to kill her. Maybe Jiaying would think it was disrespectful, since her Daisy hadn’t turned out how she wished. Her Daisy hadn’t stood by her side in the end.

All those years looking for her and when Jiaying finally found her daughter she betrayed her.

“Why is he doing this?” Mack complains when Coulson puts up the ax in his office like it’s a piece of modern art for his wall.

“I don’t think he’s doing it to mess with you,” Skye tells him. She thinks Coulson is pretty easy to read. “For him it’s a reminder of a good thing.”

Mack narrows his eyes at her. Skye finds it easier to talk to him these days than almost anyone else, probably for reasons that are unfair to Mack.

“A good thing? I _cut his hand off_.”

Skye shrugs. “Yeah but… you saved his life.”

She guesses she could see it like that, take something positive out something anyone else might find terrible. 

(she’s done this before - she keeps doing this - that’s what she does, but she doesn’t realize it, she doesn’t know her strength because she thinks it’s the same as running away)

Cal tells her a few things about her mother before he’s sent away (what a creepy sounding euphemism). Things Skye can only know through others, she will never meet the true Jiaying. The one before Whitehall… She suffered so much.

“Do you think Hydra found her because she had me?” Skye asks. It can’t be a coincidence. Whitehall had her in his lab months after Skye was born.

Cal frowns and Skye can see her own gestures in that face. It’s kind of amazing, and she wishes she had more time with the man, find out what else of her comes from him.

“I’ve asked that question to myself a thousand times,” he tells her. “Wondering if Jiaying would have been safe had she not met me and went to live with me.”

“And?”

He shrugs. “I’ve never found an answer.”

When she was a kid Skye believed parents had all the answers, and when she finally found hers they’d be able to tell her all the secrets of the universe.

It turns out her parents were more like herself than she thought. They weren’t magical. But they had wanted her, once.

Jiaying wanted her, once upon a time.

After Cal leaves (after Cal _leaves_ and someone else is left in there) Skye cuts her hair.

She hasn’t worn it this short since she was thirteen, almost fourteen - the nuns had gotten so mad at her for it that they kept her from eating with the rest of the girls for a month. It didn’t matter. She was trying to cut off bad memories. She had to do something.

Her eyes wet a bit when she does now, though. Her hair had grown so long, it hurts a bit to cut it, like she is losing something of herself (she has a horrible flash of a vision of Coulson losing his hand and feels bad about whining because her long hair is gone)

“My name is Daisy Johnson,” she says to the mirror. It sounds strange, it will sound strange for a long, long time. Because she hasn’t earned it yet. She has to be a daughter worthy of Jiaying. Even if it’s on her own way. 

She couldn’t stand besides her in her revolution, but she can make sure someone is out there looking out for the people Jiaying wanted to protect. Daisy Johnson can do that. Daisy Johnson _should_ do that.

 

**QUAKE**

The feeling that things are easier is artificial, she knows.

No, it’s dangerous.

She has felt it before. After St Agnes. Before the Rising Tide.

It just feels easy, being alone, not having anyone around. It lulls Daisy into this sort of complacency. Which is weird because she is on the run, and she has to escape detection while she carries out her mission.

She falls back into old Skye habits: talking to herself, especially when she’s at the computer. The world is too silent right now, which helps, but it also breaks her heart. At first because of Hive, his absence often made her feel out of breath, like someone had wrapped barbed wire around her chest. She knows it will never go away, this feeling more empty than before, because she can’t unknow, what it feels like to be complete, to completely connect with another being.

Then she starts noticing another absence in the silence. Something that is different to the hole Hive left in the center of her. She remembers all the noise in the Playground, how loud SHIELD had been after all her years living alone, going days and days without speaking to anyone. All those tiny, unimportant noises come back to her: the sound of the coffee machine Coulson uses at the most random hours, the clanking noises coming from the garage when Mack is working there, May’s heavy steps, so particular, a whole building of people quietly doing heroic job in the background.

She begins missing those too. Not as much as she misses Hive, but she didn’t think she could miss something other, someone other than Hive.

But she shuts it off, looking at the news, because she has a mission now, one that doesn’t allow for nostalgia. Loneliness is not just easy for her, it’s necessary.

Alone she can take more risks. There’s no one around who could get hurt, or take the fall. She is her own army, and that suits her just fine.

She misses SHIELD’s resources, sometimes, her response time is a bit slower on her own.

Tonight is a bit too late, but not exactly too late. The Watchdogs are evolving. They don’t even call themselves that anymore. She is not the only one who knows about the power of changing her name. They seem to have some trouble settling for the one, though. The words “Self Defense” are always there, but sometimes they use “American” too and sometimes they prefer “Human”. Daisy snorts, _I am both_. But she is neither. Or she is only half. she was born in China. She was born with alien genes inside her.

They’ve graduated from homemade explosives to commercial stuff. Someone private contractor backing them. There’s good money in fear-mongering, and the Inhuman threat is making a lot of cash for a lot of people.

She arrives seconds before the explosion (she would want to have Elena’s speed right now, she thinks bitterly, because she knows she can’t involve her in this) and fears she might really be too late but as soon as she comes through the door she notices a person’s vibrations, healthy, whole, but full of fear.

She makes her way through the house. A college student living out of the dorm for the first time, Daisy gathers, using the old profiling skills. Hopeful-clean and too decorated. A girl, from the looks of it.

Daisy finds her in the kitchen, terrified next to a fallen column, rubble from the wall that stops her from being able to cross over to the other side of the room.

“Are you hurt?” she asks. The girl is twenty or so, and she is hugging her arms.

She looks at Daisy stunned for a moment and then nods, still confused.

“That’s good,” Daisy says. She asks softly: “What’s your name?”

“P- It’s Penny,” she replies.

Daisy tries to give her a reassuring smile, because the girl keeps looking at the ceiling like it’s going to fall on them any moment now. Maybe, Daisy thinks, but there should always be time for a reassuring smile.

“Penny, okay,” she says, not telling her it’s a nice name or any patronizing crap, she knows from experience that sort of thing doesn’t help. “Everything will be fine.”

And that’s not patronizing, Daisy is just telling the truth. Maybe it’s arrogance and not confidence. We’ll see, Daisy thinks, challenging the world to prove her wrong again.

“What happened?” Penny asks.

“Some very bad men tried to hurt you,” Daisy tells her.

“Why?”

“Because your name was on a list and that list got out.”

“The Registration…”

Daisy nods. “Yeah.”

“But I thought signing up would-”

“Keep you safe?” Daisy finishes. Her jaw tenses. The government promised Inhuman who registered with them would be kept anonymous and safe if their powers weren’t destructive. She doesn’t ask Penny what kind of ability she has. She wants Inhumans to know that they can keep those secret if they want. No one has the right to that information. “Listen, Penny. You didn’t nothing wrong. It’s not your fault, trusting the government. It’s theirs for not keeping you safe. Okay?”

The girls nods again.

“I’m going to get this rubbled out of the way so you can come out. Just… don’t freak out.”

“Freak out…” Penny whispers.

But Daisy is already in position. She takes a couple of steps back and raises her hand. The trick is to move the whole crumbling column without destroying it, for risk of hurting Penny. It takes some focus but she’s been practicing a lot. Figuring out she needs to be _perfect_ at this, the very thing that makes the world hate her so much. And she is improving, fast, doing things with her powers she didn’t think possible (okay, she thinks she might be able to kind of maybe fly soon, that’s a bit cool).

Once the column is out of the way she offers Penny her hand to help her jump over the bits of wall in front of her.

“Who are you?” the girl asks.

Daisy hesitates.

 _Daisy Johnson_ is not going to mean anything to her (or anyone) and she can’t use _Agent_ anymore. She has been trolling the forums, looking at what people think her superhero (or supervillain, depending on the site you were in) name should be, and in that moment she remembers one name -

(and it’s cool and gender neutral and it doesn’t shy away from who she is - a walking disaster)

“Quake,” she says. “I’m Quake.”

“What kind of name is that?” the girl says, dry and down to earth.

Daisy laughs, out loud (is it the first time since-? is this a betrayal?), and grabs the girl’s arm and pulls her from under the rubble.

“Come on, let’s get you somewhere safe.”

“Is there?” she asks. “Anywhere safe?”

Daisy smiles, a bit sadly, a bit proud. “I’m working on it.”

The two of them make it out just in time, before the house collapses.

A close call, but that’s where she lives.

In her dream Coulson told her she was good at this. Surviving.

And maybe that’s true. Maybe she is a little too good at this.

But it’s not enough, she decides, as she drives Penny somewhere safe.

She wants to do more than just survive now.


End file.
